crump

/kɹʌmp/

crump noun: the sound of a muffled explosion.

Noun

crump (plural crumps)

The sound of a muffled explosion.
- And there was another bit [of a hymn]: ‘To an inheritance incorruptible. … Through faith unto salvation, Ready to be revealèd at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing ‘crump.’ ‘The last crump’ was the end of the war and would we ever hear it burst safely behind us?1929 November, Robert Graves, chapter XVIII, in Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC, page 251
- Crump, crack! A shell exploded near them and the whole aircraft yawned to port as if somebody had punched it through the sky.1999, Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Verb (1)

crump (third-person singular simple present crumps, present participle crumping, simple past and past participle crumped)

(intransitive) To produce such a sound.
- “Mortars crumped, and from the high ground to the east and south came the shriek of 88-millimeter shells, green fireballs that whizzed through the dunes at half a mile a second, trailing golden plumes of dust.”2007 September 28, William Grimes, “In Middle Leg of the Race, the Prize Was Italy”, in New York Times

Adjective (1)

crump (comparative more crump, superlative most crump)

(Scotland, UK, dialectal) Hard or crusty; dry baked
- a crump loaf

Adjective (2)

crump (comparative more crump, superlative most crump)

(obsolete) Crooked; bent.
- Crooked backs and crump shoulders.1701, John Gauden (attributed), Several Letters between Two Ladies Wherein the Lawfulness and Unlawfulness of Artificial Beauty in Point of Conscience are Nicely Debated

Verb (2)

crump (third-person singular simple present crumps, present participle crumping, simple past and past participle crumped)

(US, intransitive, medical slang) To decline rapidly in health (but not as rapidly as crash).
- I can only be in one place at a time, so sometimes I just have to say, “Listen, I’ve got this other patient that’s crumping down the hall.[”]1998, Marsha E. Fonteyn, Thinking Strategies for Nursing Practice, Lippincott, page 167
- if the patient is acutely crumping from cardiac arrest, do not waste time doing an ECG when you could be performing CPR.2009, Kevin Schwechten, USMLE Step 3 Triage: An Effective, No-nonsense Review, Oxford University Press, page 4
Synonyms:

circle the drain

Proper noun capitalized: Crump

Crump (countable and uncountable, plural Crumps)

A surname from Middle English.
- In a news conference Monday afternoon, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Massey’s family, connected her death to other cases of police violence against Black people across the US. […] Crump referenced what Grayson said – “I’ll f**king shoot you in the f**king face” – before Massey was...2024 July 24, Emma Tucker and Bill Kirkos, “What we know about the deputy charged with killing Sonya Massey in her home after she called 911 for help”, in CNN, archived from the original on 07 Feb...
An unincorporated community in Garfield Township, Bay County, Michigan, United States.
An unincorporated community in Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, United States.
A city in Hardin County, Tennessee, United States.

crump meaning in Tamil and Malayalam

Examples of crump in a sentence

Above this grey skyline slowly lifting clouds of dirty smoke rose into the morning air as the salvoes of Japanese shells exploded with a delayed crump.2000, Richard Woodman, The Darkening Sea:
"Now you can see what life is like for us here," said Yakov Shoshani, raising his voice to make himself heard over the sound of a loud crump.2008, Paul Wood, BBC News., Taking cover on Sderot front line:
Not to be confused with the dance style, doctors use 'crumping' when they have a patient that is 'crashing, but not aggressively,' the Chicago doctor told Daily Mail Online.2017 December 30, Natalie Rahhal, “The secret codes doctors use to INSULT their patients right in front of them - and why the lingo harms...

Synonyms of crump

circle the drain

Forms of crump

Noun
plural	crumps
Verb
third-person singular present	crumps
present participle	crumping
past participle	crumped
past	crumped
Adjective
comparative	more crump
superlative	most crump
Proper noun
plural	Crumps

Plural of crump: crumps

Origin of crump

Onomatopoeic.

See crumb.

From Middle English crump, cromp, croume, from Old English crump, crumb (“stooping, bent, crooked”), from Proto-West Germanic *krump, from Proto-Germanic *krumpaz, *krumbaz (“bent”). Compare Dutch krom (“bent”), German krumm (“crooked”), Danish krum. Related to cramp.

Words formed from crump

crumple
crumpy
Crump Island

Words that rhyme with crump

18 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about crump

What does crump mean?: Crump means the sound of a muffled explosion.
What is crump in Tamil?: Crump in Tamil is பாளம். See Crump meaning in Tamil.
How do you use crump in a sentence?: Above this grey skyline slowly lifting clouds of dirty smoke rose into the morning air as the salvoes of Japanese shells exploded with a delayed crump.
What part of speech is crump?: Crump can be a noun, a verb, an adjective or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce crump?: Crump is pronounced /kɹʌmp/.
What is the plural of crump?: The plural of crump is crumps.

Words near crump in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: crump (page history and authors); Crump (page history and authors); crump (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); crump (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-crump.wav.

Cite this entry: “crump.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crump. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.